Call her Sister.

Sister Cole, Sister president, Sister no-doors-closed and no-holds-barred. Call her Sister because she'll call you Sister, or Brother, and mean it.

That's how it is with Johnnetta Cole -- scholar, teacher, author, public speaker extraordinaire, friend of the famous such as Bill Cosby, Maya Angelou and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and not so unsung herself as a pioneering black woman who sits on corporate boards ranging from Home Depot to the Atlanta Falcons and has collected more than 50 honorary degrees, along with her own hard-earned doctorate in anthropology from Northwestern University.

First black woman president of Spelman College in Atlanta, first black woman to head the national United Way, first black woman ... you get the picture.

The tall, rail-thin sister who saved Bennett College, trading a comfortable retirement in 2002 for the presidency of a school in serious trouble with financial, accreditation and infrastructure problems. After 21/2 years of Cole's passionate, high-energy, never-say-die leadership, the small, private college for black women -- one of only two in the country -- has erased a $3.8 million deficit, had its accreditation restored and the infrastructure, well, she's working on that.

At 68, Cole champions the cause of Bennett College for Women as a speechmaker, cheerleader and nonstop fund-raiser who has helped raise $22 million for the school since her arrival.

She enlisted the aid of U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole to prevail upon her husband, former Sen. Bob Dole, to lead a $60 million fund drive for the college.

There's no door upon which Cole won't knock, no stone she won't turn over to find money for the school, she says.

"I'm so obsessed with it," Cole said.

You knew that, of course, if you've been in the audience over the past couple of years for one of Cole's patented Bennett-booster speeches, which she gives on demand, which is heavy and continual.

"I don't need notes for that one," Cole said. "I have it down."

That's how she's able to handle the killer schedule crammed into her hand-held electronic organizer -- an itinerary that had her flying to Michigan and Chicago for speeches last month for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, then jetting back to town to address a room full of well-heeled white women at a brunch for the venerable Tuesday Study Club at the Greensboro Country Club.

"My sisters all," she said in greeting the group. And she meant it.

Life is complex but not necessarily complicated for Johnnetta Cole, who is up at 5 each morning, working out on the treadmill her three sons gave her for Christmas and getting ready for another long and challenging day.

She has made the president's house -- a comfortable, spacious home on Gorrell Street across from campus -- her own. The treadmill is in place on the second floor, while the walls and shelves are filled with paintings, African masks, African American art and mementos gathered during jaunts around the world.

Hers is a working kitchen; though Cole, twice divorced, lives alone, she has been known to cook for visiting luminaries and academics who fly in to speak, advise or observe at Bennett.

She loves music, particularly jazz. And she likes to dance.

"I'm a novice at cooking,'' Cole said, "but I can hold my own in cutting a rug.''

In fact, Cole admits with a chuckle that she made money during her undergraduate days at Oberlin College in Ohio by giving dance lessons to, yes, white students.

Cole loves to laugh, to crack dry, witty jokes in the slow, measured, rich tone that made her a star in the classroom as a professor of anthropology and women's studies and now makes her a speaker in demand. After all, she was on Oberlin's debate team and had grown up in a self-assured family in Jacksonville, Fla., where her great-grandfather became the city's first black millionaire by founding a life insurance company that insured black customers because white companies wouldn't.

Affluence brought advantages, Cole says, but in other ways it just emphasized the irrational cruelty of the Jim Crow laws in the segregated South of the 1940s and '50s.

"I grew up in a well-appointed home,'' she said. "And right across the street was a swimming pool in which I could not swim and a park I could not go into.''

Faced with such injustice, Cole says, a person can choose one of two paths: "You either turn bitter, or you commit yourself to trying to get rid of it."

Cole chose the latter -- beginning college at age 15 at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., where in 1952, she was introduced to black intellectuals, the complexities of jazz and a rich culture she hardly knew existed.

"It was like moving into an extraordinarily wonderful world," she said.

A year later, after her father died, Cole transferred to Oberlin to be with her sister. Oberlin, though its campus was overwhelmingly white, also was extraordinarily open and welcoming, Cole says.

There, she found her academic niche as a cultural anthropologist, a career choice that would take her to Northwestern for graduate work, to the African nation of Liberia and to a black church on Chicago's south side, where she did field study for her doctorate.

Cole discovered that she liked people, liked to study them, motivate and educate them. And she liked to change things.

"Life, no matter how much of it you're blessed to have, is too short,'' she said.

And there is so much yet to do.

Friends and colleagues describe Cole as a force of nature, eminently comfortable with herself in any environment, from all-black churches to all-white country clubs to corporate boardrooms.

She's known for championing diversity in the workplace and at Bennett, where she is working to establish a degree program for diversity management.

Last year, she launched the Johnnetta B. Cole Global Diversity and Inclusion Institute -- right there in the president's house.

Whatever the audience, Cole seems able to cut to the heart of uncomfortable issues with a deftness that puts people at ease and drives no wedges, whether the issue is presidential politics, the state of black families or the lack of female faces, particularly black female faces, in too many executive suites.

"I want to peel the onion," Cole said.

Perhaps it's the teacher in her. At Spelman, the country's other private, historically black school for women, she taught a course every spring.

"I'm happy in that environment,'' Cole said.

She'd love to do the same at Bennett, Cole says, but she's been too busy fund raising, flying to cities such as New York where she mixes speechmaking with calls upon potential corporate donors, whom Cole has carefully researched before the trip.

"There are needs to be met here," she said.

No doubt, soliciting money remains Cole's most vital role at Bennett, where the enrollment, though up, still hovers around 600, the endowment is only $8 million, and too many ancient dorms and classroom buildings still look ready to crumble despite heroic patchwork from staffers and maintenance crews.

Life was far different at Spelman, founded in 1881, eight years after newly freed slaves opened Bennett in a church basement.

Spelman, a nationally ranked liberal arts college, is blessed by a rich endowment, a student body of more than 2,000 and its location as part of the Atlanta University Center, a partnership with Clarke and Morehouse universities and other schools that forms the world's largest consortium of black universities.

It was Spelman that was the beneficiary of a $20 million donation from Cosby in 1987, when Cole was inaugurated as the school's seventh president.

Bennett's small campus, about a mile east of downtown Greensboro in an area bounded by Bennett, Gorrell and East Washington streets, is just as long on tradition but woefully short of money, particularly for new buildings.

About 90 percent of its students get financial aid to help pay the school's $17,000 annual tuition. Alumni giving traditionally has been low.

"Anywhere you look, you see a need," said Cole, who obviously likes a challenge.

It was her friend Angelou, a Bennett trustee, who offered the bait.

"She told me this was something that I was needed to do," said Cole, who was then living in Atlanta and had just gone through her second divorce.

Cole thought the Bennett job would offer a change and keep her busy. She had no idea how right she would be.

The job, she says, is only half done; Cole is at the midway point of a five-year commitment to get Bennett back on its feet financially, academically and culturally, securing its niche as a prime higher-education choice for young black women.

Cole has reveled in traditions unique to the school, where its students are known as "Bennett Belles," curfew is still enforced, and incoming students wear white when they are welcomed each semester at a convocation in the chapel and sign their names for posterity in Bennett's official register.

But she's also brought changes, widening the diversity of the school's student body to include more Hispanic, white and Native American students, setting up a program to boost alumni participation and donations, helping to institute a Middle College program for teenage girls foundering in public high schools, and tackling common issues with the city's other colleges.

There's still so much to do; Cole wants more enrollment, a necessary fact of life if colleges are to stay afloat in this century, she says.

But she wants Bennett's classes to stay small and the school's focus to remain one of educating young black women. She wants the school to retain its strength areas -- teacher education and science -- while broadening its curriculum with programs in African women's studies and religion. More diversity won't change that, she says.

Cole says she's developed a love for the Triad and hints that she just might stay after her five years are up.

"People have been so incredibly welcoming,'' she said.

The word is, Cole has found someone she enjoys dating, when her schedule permits.

"Let's just say I've found a balance in my life," she said with a smile portending much.

And there's so much yet to accomplish at Bennett, where new buildings are desperately needed, the fund raising can never stop and the pace never seems to slow.

A pace fit only, it seems, for Sister Cole.

Date published: 2/20/2005  - News & Record